THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS
I knew my friends and family would appreciate holding a piece of paper that had traveled from a combat zone halfway around the world; evidence that I was thinking of them during my down time, that I was alive and well because I was writing.
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Masks remain securely affixed in my corner of the world. The protests are steady. I am grappling with Are you writing. How to write during a global fraying and how not to?
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To quote one more recent literary ancestor, Toni Cade Bambara, “The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” Protests against bias, prejudice, and injustice are urgent.
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If human beings could retain the trusting color blindness with which every one of us is born, we would never experience the fearful dehumanization that is the life blood of both racism and war.
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Growing up, my brother and I were made to wash our hands after handling paper bills or coins because, we were sternly told, money carries germs. Now, during this strange hiccup in history, I wash my hands for 20 seconds after I have taken dollar bills out of my wallet and smile at the rueful memories of childhood. But along with them comes, for the very first time, a whiff of something darker—a sense of family-transmitted fear, trauma, and death that might have kicked off this practice a hundred years ago.
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Today’s lesson from faculty member Richard Panek: “Everything counts in art. And writing is no exception. Every choice. Every word. Every piece of punctuation. Every paragraph break. Everything. Everything is a choice, and everything needs to be there for a reason.”
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Alumna Jess Lewis offers empathy and advice for our Covid 19 world, based on her experience of being trapped in a person-sized tent in Antarctica for weeks on end: “I felt like I had lost control of everything. So I sat down one day and wrote down a few things that I could do daily that would bring me joy and that would establish some amount of control over my day-to-day life.”
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Goddard MFAW Program Director Elena Georgiou gets help writing a poem from the Goddard community of writers when her own words fail. Read the result of this magical connection. (Maybe your own words are here.)
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